Twenty-two acres of trees. I set down the chain saw and
stretch my arms, aching from the weight and vibration. I look across the meadow
at the solid wall of green on the other side. It’s lovely and verdant, but
still foreign to these Texas eyes that long for big horizons. It seems that my
little chain saw and I cannot keep up with the deadfall. Every winter the snow
and ice and wind bring down a few trees. If they’re in the woods they can just
lie, but if they fall in my meadow or yard or pasture, they have to be cut up
and stacked for firewood. It’s an endless job.
After decades of suburbia and a career in IT, this new life
I’ve chosen is a dream come true, but like all dreams, it’s a little weird. The
structure I became so accustomed to, that chafed me, has fallen away. No more
project plans, Gantt charts, weekly status meetings. No more project charters,
kick offs, milestones, or releases. No more quarterly reviews or annual budget planning.
No more hours spent in unproductive meetings.
Sweat trickles from my hair into my eyes, despite my
baseball cap. I take off my hat and wipe my forehead with the back of my work glove.
My eyes track the flight of my resident hawk, hunting mice in the meadow. It
swoops, dives, misses, returns to its tree with empty claws to wait and watch
and try again. I consider taking a break, going inside to dry my sweat and chug
some iced tea. I check my chain saw bar oil level, see that it’s sufficient,
start it up again. This hackberry is surprisingly tough to cut. The clear white
wood is dense, as tenacious in death as a hackberry tree is in life, sprouting
anywhere and everywhere you don’t want it to grow, filling fencerows and popping
up between the tomatoes or the zinnias.
The last project before I gave notice was the final straw. Twenty years’ experience, a senior consultant, and I was scanning lines of Java code trying to pull a list of data fields to create a data mapping schema, work any software developer could have done faster and better. It was just one absurdity too many. In the midst of a pandemic, with my garden wilting and my horses nickering and my chickens clucking just outside my window, trying to make sense of lines of poorly written, uncommented code in between hours of mandatory team meetings, my mind rebelled.
Years of helping client companies succeed. Years of activism
and marching to help make my state a better place to live. Years of sacrifice
and work to raise and support my children. My dreams stored in a dusty shoebox
in the corner of the closet. It doesn’t do to dwell on could haves. Life is the
art of the possible. The smell of dirt, the sharp flavor of a fresh tomato, the
mellow sweetness of a horse’s breath, the quiet of a country gloaming, starry
nights, drinking morning coffee on my porch looking across my own land, not
waking each morning to a day of Zoom and dread, longed for freedom from the
life that had chosen me. The personal is political. What good to save the world
if I couldn’t save myself?
This dark fantasy we’re sold, that we can work hard and
reinvent our lives. And I worked so hard. I finally had a little to show for
it, at least, and I grasped at that straw like a drowning woman clutches the
watery weeds.
There are seasons here in Virginia, each in their turn. It
rains and snows and shines and blows. The flowers bloom and fade. The bees buzz
busily all over the barnyard. The horses shed and grow sleek and then sweat and
swat the flies and grumble. I wake up each morning and look across the foggy
meadow to spot the deer before they disappear into the woods, brew coffee,
dress, write, work, read the news, watch the world spinning closer to disaster,
watch the abandoned farmhouses on the road to town crumbling a little more with
every rain, every season, watch my bank account dwindle like the old lichen-covered
rail fence.
There is beauty, and good crumbly soil, and okra to make
gumbo, but is there joy, in a world devoted to trauma and death? I write, but
can my words make anyone see? I march and organize and write postcards and knock on doors, but can I shift the
trajectory of a world going mad? I hug my children, but can I build them a
future worth living in? I meet my friends for a drink, but can we laugh with
real joy? I can make really good pickles. I can brush this horse and rasp her
hooves and clean her stall. I can cut this firewood and stack it neatly against
the coming winter. I can pull the endless weeds that sprout between the tomato
plants. I talk to the bunny that lives in the barnyard. It twitches its pink ears,
unafraid, then lopes lazily away. Bound to clover patch and meadow, a short
life and the endless demands of reproduction, it is still more free than I. No
one demands more than it can do or charges it rent for its space on this earth.
Only humans do that.
